Barack Obama is one of the greatest politicians in American history. After a historic national election in 2008 based on a vague message of hope and change, he has just shifted gears and won a second term with a tough-minded, hard-grinding state-by-state get-out-the-vote effort that overcame this fundamental fact: He shouldn’t have won at all.
I said several times over the course of this year in this column that he would lose, because the condition of the country under the years of his stewardship would make it impossible for him to survive the electorate’s judgment. There was ample recent precedent for this: Gerald Ford hadn’t survived it in 1976; Jimmy Carter hadn’t survived it in 1980; George H.W. Bush hadn’t survived it in 1992.
I was wrong for several reasons — reasons that help explain just how impressive his victory was and what it portends.
First, this election (unlike 1992, with the presence of Ross Perot) presented voters with a simple binary choice. It wasn’t just Barack Obama; it was Barack Obama vs. Mitt Romney, and clearly the president was a more persuasive advocate.
It was his task to remind Americans how dire the straits were that his predecessor had sailed the nation into — so dire that it was too much to expect him to get us out of them in four years.
He also had to make the case that he had worked hard to make things better, even though the two biggest things he did as president (the $860 billion stimulus and his health-care bill) were and are pretty unpopular.
He managed to do these things well enough to lift the spirits of Democratic partisans who had grown so despondent in the middle of his administration that many stayed home in the 2010 midterm elections and allowed Republicans to win the most lopsided Congressional and state-level victories in 80 years.
But even as he made this rather modest case for himself, he was in effect aiming a billion-dollar howitzer at a single target: Mitt Romney.
And here was where his campaign’s tactical genius came into play. Its leaders spent the summer “defining” Romney in effectively harsh terms, while Romney mostly raised money to compete in the fall. And they did so only where they needed to do it most — in the states that provided Romney a path to the White House.
What we surely learned last night, as almost all those swing states turned out to be beyond Romney’s reach, was just how astoundingly effective that effort was. And how, simply as a technical matter, astonishingly deep and detailed the Obama get-out-the-vote effort was.
The exit polls suggest that after a relatively disappointing first term, Obama managed to reassemble almost all of his 2008 electorate. Voters last night were 39 percent Democratic, just as they were in 2008, while Republicans ticked up a mere point, from 32 percent to 33 percent.
How did the president and his people do it? With great competence.
But not just competence. They turned out key chunks of the population that supported Obama by overwhelming margins — young people, African-Americans, Hispanics and (the killer app of 2012) single women.
Obama’s coalition would have consigned him to the political margins as little as 12 years ago, but the nation’s demographic changes are moving far more quickly than most Republicans anticipated.
The 2004 presidential election that saw George W. Bush win with 51 percent of the vote was the last one Republicans will ever win with the overwhelmingly white and male coalition they have now.
They will have to find a way to shuffle the demographic deck to get themselves back in the game — and that will be a challenge, because the set of issues that speaks most directly to the party’s core are self-evidently unattractive to the new voters they need to attract.
Still, one must stand in awe of Barack Obama, who really pulled a rabbit out of the hat and magicked himself up four more years. Bravo.
I fear very much what he is going to do to the country, but you have to admire this political master and his amazing handicraft.